For over two decades, from 1948 to
1969, Dr. J. Allen Hynek was a consultant in astronomy to the United States
Air Force. The subject of his advice, however, was not the fledgling space
program or even the moon and stars above, but Unidentified Flying Objects.
In 1973 he founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and had serves as Director
and editor of its journal, "International UFO Reporter."

STACY: Dr. Hynek, as a scientist,
you go back as far with UFO phenomenon as probably anyone alive today. Exactly
how did that relationship begin?

HYNEK: That's an easy story to tell.
In the spring of 1948, I was teaching astronomy at Ohio State University,
in Columbus. One day thee men, and they weren't dressed in black, came over
to see me from Wright Patterson Air Force Base in nearby Dayton. They started
out by talking about the weather, as I remember, and this and that, and then
finally one of them asked me what I thought about flying saucers. I told them
I thought they were a lot of junk and nonsense and that seemed to please them,
so they got down to business. They said they needed some astronomical consultation
because it was their job to find out what these flying saucer stories were
all about.

Some were meteors, they thought, others
stars and so on, so they could use an astronomer. What the hell, I said, it
sounded like fun and besides, I would be getting a top secret security clearance
out of it, too. At that time, it was called Project Sign, and some of the
personnel at least were taking the problem quite seriously. At the same time
a big split was occurring in the Air Force between two schools of thought.
The serious school prepared an estimation of the situation which they sent
to General Vandenburg, but the other side eventually won out and the serious
ones were shipped off to other places. The negatives won the day, in other
words.

My own investigations for Project
Sign added to that, too, I think, because I was quite negative in most of
my evaluations. I stretched far to give something a natural explanation, sometimes
when it may not have really had it. I remember one case from Snake River Canyon,
I think it was, where a man and his two sons saw a metallic object come swirling
down the canyon which caused the top of the trees to sway. In my attempt to
find a natural explanation for it, I said that it was some sort of atmospheric
eddy. Of course, I had never seen an eddy like that and had no real reason
to believe that one even existed. But I was so anxious to find a natural explanation
because I was convinced that it had to have one that, naturally, I did in
fact, it wasn't until quite some time had passed that I began to change my
mind.

STACY:Was there ever any direct pressure
applied by the Air Force itself for you to come up with a conventional explanation
to these phenomena?

HYNEK:There was an implied pressure,
yes, very definitely.

STACY:In other words, you found yourself
caught, like most of us, in a situation of trying to please your boss?

HYNEK:Yes, you might as well put it
that way, although at the same time I wasn't going against my scientific precepts.
As an astronomer and physicist, I simply felt a priori that everything had
to have a natural explanation in this world. There were no ifs, ands or buts
about it. The ones I couldn't solve, I thought if we just tried harder, had
a really proper investigation, that we probably would find as answer for.
My batting average was about 80 percent and I figured that anytime you were
hitting that high, you were doing pretty good. That left about 20 percent
unsolved for me, but only about three or four percent for the Air Force, because
they used statistics in a way I would never have allowed for myself. For example,
cases labeled as insufficient information they would consider solved! They
also had some other little tricks. If a light were seen, they would say, "aircraft
have lights, therefore, probable aircraft." Then, at the end of the year,
when the statistics were made up, they would drop the "possible"
or "probable" and simply call it aircraft.

STACY:What began to change your own
perception of the phenomenon?

HYNEK:Two things, really. One was
the completely negative and unyielding attitude of the Air Force. They wouldn't
give UFOs the chance of existing, even if they were flying up and down the
street in broad daylight. Everything had to have as explanation. I began to
resent that, even though I basically felt the same way, because I still thought
they weren't going about it in the right way. You can't assume that everything
is black no matter what. Secondly, the caliber of the witnesses began to trouble
me. Quite a few instances were reported by military pilots, for example, and
I knew them to be fairly well-trained, so this is when I first began to think
that, well, maybe there something to all this.

The famous "swamp gas" case
which came later on finally pushed me over the edge. From that point on, I
began to look at reports from a different angle, which was to say that some
of them could be true UFOs.

STACY:As your own attitude changed,
did the Air Force's attitude toward you change, too?

HYNEK:It certainly did, quite a bit,
as a matter of fact. By way of background, I might add that the late Dr. James
E. McDonald, a good friend of mine who was then an atmospheric meteorologist
at the University of Arizona, and I had some fairly sharp words about it.
He used to accuse me very much, saying you're the scientific consultant to
the Air Force, you should be pounding on generals' doors and insisting on
getting a better job done. I said, Jim, I was there, you weren't you don't
know the mindset. They were under instruction from the Pentagon, following
the Robertson Panel of 1953, that the whole subject had to be debunked, period,
no question about it. That was the prevailing attitude. The panel was convened
by the CIA, and I sat in on it, but I was not asked to sign the resolution.
Had I been asked, I would not have signed it, because they took a completely
negative attitude about everything. So when Jim McDonald used to accuse me
of a sort of miscarriage of scientific justice, I had to tell him that had
I done what he wanted, the generals would not have listened to me. They were
already listening to Dr. Donald Menzel and the other boys over at the Harvard
Astronomy Department as it was.

STACY:Did you think you would have
been shown the front door and asked not to come back?

HYNEK:Inside of two weeks I imagine.
You're familiar with the case of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler from the
history of astronomy? Brahe had the observations and didn't know what to do
with them, and Kepler,who was nearsighted and couldn't make the observations,
did. So essentially, I played Kepler to the Air Force's Tycho Brahe. I knew
the Air Force was getting the data and I wanted a look at it, so I made very
full use of the copying machines at Wright-Patterson. I kept practically a
duplicate set of records because I knew that someday that data would be worth
something. Toward the end, however, I was barely speaking with Major Quintanilla
who was in charge. We had started as really good friends and then things got
very bad because he had one lieutenant who was such a nincompoop, it seemed
to me. Everything had to be "Jupiter or Venus" or this or that.
You have no idea what a closed mind, what a closed attitude it was. I kept
doggedly on, but I can safely say that the whole time I was with the Air Force
we never had anything that resembled a really good scientific dialogue on
the subject.

STACY:They weren't really interested
in an actual investigation of the subject then?

HYNEK:They said they were, of course,
but they would turn handsprings to keep a good case from getting to the "attention
of the media". Any case they solved, they had no trouble talking to the
media about. It was really very sad.... I think their greatest mistake in
the early days, however, was not turning it over to the universities or some
academic group. They regarded it as an intelligence matter and it became increasingly
more and more embarrassing to them. After all, we paid good tax dollars to
have the Air Force guard our skies and it would have been bad public relations
for them to say, yes there's something up there, but we're helpless. They
just couldn't do that, so they took the very human action of protecting their
own interests. What they said was that we solved 96 per cent of the cases
and that we could have solved the other four per cent if we had just tried
harder.

STACY:Was it the famous Michigan sightings
of 1966, explained away as "swamp gas" that finally did lead the
Air Force to bring in a reputable university?

HYNEK:Yes, that, as you know, became
something of a national joke and Michigan was soon being known as the "Swamp
Gas State." Eventually, it resulted in a Congressional Hearing called
for by then state Congressman, Gerald Ford, who of course later went on to
become President. The investigation was turned over to the Brian O'Brien Committee
who did a very good job. Had their recommendations been carried out, things
might have turned out much better than they did. The recommended that UFOs
be taken away from the Air Force and given to a group of universities, to
study the thing in a as wide a way as possible. Well, they didn't go to a
group, they went to a university and a man they were certain would be very
hard-nosed about it, namely, Dr. Edward Condon at the University of Colorado.
That was how the Condon Committee and eventually the Report came to be.

STACY:Were you ever called on to testify
before, or advise the Committee?

HYNEK:In the early days they called
on me to talk to them, to brief them, but that was the extent of it. They
certainly didn't take any of my advice.

STACY:By 1968, the generally negative
Condon Report was made public and the Air Force used its conclusions to get
out of the UFO business. Were you still an official advisor or consultant
at that time?

HYNEK:Oh, yes, I was with the Air
Force right up until the very end, but it was just on paper. No one had cut
the chicken's head off yet, but the chicken was dead. The last days at Blue
Book were just a perfunctory shuffling of papers.

STACY:In terms of the UFO phenomenon
itself, what was going on about this time?

HYNEK:Well, as you know, the Condon
Report said that a group of scientists had looked at UFOs and that the subject
was dead. The UFOs, of course, didn't bother to read the report and during
the Flap of 1973, they came back in force.